The English traveller lighting upon so many of the essentially English riches as are conserved in American libraries, and particularly when he has not a meagre share of national pride, cannot but pause to wonder how it came about—and comes about—that so much that ought to be in its own country has been permitted to stray.
In England collectors and connoisseurs are by no means rare. What, then, were they doing to let all these letters of Keats and Shelley, Burns and Byron, Lamb and Johnson—to name for the moment nothing else—find their resting-place in America? The dollar is very powerful, I know, but should it have been as pre-eminently powerful as this? Need it have defeated so much patriotism?
Pictures come into a different category, for every artist painted more than one picture. I have experienced no shade of resentment towards their new owners in looking at the superb collections of old and new foreign masters in the American public and private galleries; for so long as there are enough examples of the masters to go round, every nation should have a share. With MSS., however, it is different. Facsimiles, such as the Boston Bibliographical Society's edition of Lamb's letters, would serve for the rest of the world, and the originals should be in their author's native land. But that is a counsel of perfection. The only thing to do is to grin and bear it, and feel happy that these unique possessions are preserved with such loving pride and care. Any idea of retaliation on America on the part of England by buying up the MSS. of the great American writers, such as Franklin and Poe, Hawthorne and Emerson, Thoreau and Lowell, Holmes and Whitman, was rendered futile by the discovery that Mr. Morgan possesses these too. I had in his library all the Breakfast Table series in my hands, together with a play by Poe not yet published.
MOUNT VERNON
Mention of the beautiful solicitude with which these treasures are surrounded, suggests the reflection that the old country has something to learn from the new in the matter of distinguished custodianship. We have no place of national pilgrimage in England that is so perfect a model as Washington's home at Mount Vernon. It is perhaps through lack of a figure of the Washington type that we have nothing to compare with it; for any parallel one must rather go to Fontainebleau; but certain shrines are ours and none of them discloses quite such pious thoroughness as this. When I think of the completeness of the preservation and reconstruction of Mount Vernon, where, largely through the piety of individuals, a thousand personal relics have been reassembled, so that, save for the sightseers, this serene and simple Virginian mansion is almost exactly as it was, I am filled with admiration. For a young people largely in a hurry to find time to be so proud and so reverent is a significant thing.
Nor is this spirit of pious reverence confined to national memorials. Longfellow's Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, although still only a hostelry, compares not unfavourably with Dove Cottage at Grasmere and Carlyle's house in Chelsea. The preservation is more minute. But to return to Mount Vernon, the orderliness of the place is not its least noticeable feature. There is no mingling of trade with sentiment, as at Stratford-on-Avon, for example. Within the borders of the estate everything is quiet. I have never seen Americans in church (not, I hasten to add, because they abstain, but because I did), but I am sure that they could not, even there, behave more as if the environment were sacred. To watch the crowds at Mount Vernon, and to contemplate the massive isolated grandeur of the Lincoln Memorial now being finished at Washington, is to realise that America, for all its superficial frivolity and cynicism, is capable of a very deep seriousness.